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The 2018 elections may prove highly consequential for environment and energy policy, possibly slowing or even reversing the Trump-GOP deregulatory agenda. The latest Issue Backgrounder helps reporters frame the choices voters face, including environmental justice and offshore drilling.
"More than 700 people have left the Environmental Protection Agency since President Trump took office, a wave of departures that puts the administration nearly a quarter of the way toward its goal of shrinking the agency to levels last seen during the Reagan administration."
"More than 65 million people are displaced from their homes, the largest number since the Second World War, and nearly 25 million of them are refugees and asylum seekers living outside their own country. But that number doesn’t include people displaced by climate change."
"President Trump on Wednesday was poised to sign the new tax bill, passed by Congress, which lifts a decades-old ban on oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern Alaska. ... Will exploration begin immediately? No. Both supporters and opponents say it could be years before the first lease sale, a precursor to any drilling."
"Melting permafrost and major storms are eating away at the coastal Alaskan village of Newtok. Residents are desperate to move, but the U.S. has no climate change relocation plan that could help them."
"Hoping for more unfettered production of coal, oil and gas even as it erects wind farms, a Wyoming county sees the president as a key to job security."
"Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke brought the leader of a California park to his office last month to reprimand him for climate change-related tweets the park had sent via Twitter, two sources close to the situation said."